Hello & Welcome to I.B!

I believe in personal freedom. Financial freedom. I believe in being able to lead your life responsibly. Don't settle for the rat race—this includes schooling, jobs, the things you buy, and everything that keeps you in meaningless motion.

This blog is about a compilation of insights that will help you refine how you see so that you can refine how you do. It will change the way you perceive life. It will amplify your perspective and improve the quality of your decisions.

Will you join me on this journey? If any of these words resonate with you, subscribe and let's figure this out together. Happy reading!

Love Within, Action Beyond

Balancing Self-Love and Selfless Action

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love moves the world. It moves us. It gives our lives meaning. We all know what it means to love and be loved, but it’s much harder to know how to stay in love. However, when it comes to loving ourselves, we don’t know what to do. It’s as if the love we deserve is only validated externally. But eventually, we must realize that to learn to love ourselves and to seek within are fundamental pillars of our well-being and fulfillment in life. Many problems arise throughout our lifetimes when we don’t. We get depressed. We feel lonely. Nothing makes sense and we turn outward for love, creating all sorts of additional problems. Read more!

The Truth About Finding Purpose

A Guide to Meaningful Living

After decades of school defining my sense of purpose, the idea of finding myself seemed intriguing. I first came across this concept in Tony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within, where he discusses the importance of understanding your “why.” He explains that with a strong enough why, we can better navigate emotional struggles, overcome life’s obstacles, and remain committed to our goals. With a clear purpose, he argues, we can always find the “how.” Since then, I’ve read countless books on everything purpose-related: personal calling, starting with why, intrinsic motivation, higher purpose, and the true north—you name it. What I’ve come to realize is that the truth about finding purpose extends far beyond just self-reflection. Read more!

Embracing the Paradoxes of Life

Embracing the paradoxes of life reveals how it isn’t linear, nor does it have a single right answer. Life can be better understood through seemingly contradicting truths that challenge our conventional thinking. Each paradox opens us up to a deeper understanding about the inner workings of life, helping us grasp what we otherwise couldn’t. Read more!

Reclaiming Virtue, Wisdom, and Meaning in Life

Why Balancing Reason and Wisdom in the Modern Age Matters

“It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

I believe that humanity stands at a critical crossroads. Our obsession with science, technology, and now artificial intelligence is systematically undermining the very essence of what it means to be human. This transformation begins with how we educate our youth—with a definite bias toward scientific rationality. While the Western educational model separated from religious institutions to honor cultural freedom and diversity, it left a void that hasn’t yet been filled, deeply affecting our human experience. Let’s explore how reclaiming virtue, wisdom, and meaning in life can start with understanding why virtue forms the vital foundation of our human development. Read more!

A Philosophy of Gratitude

A Gateway to Virtue

“Gratitude is the single most important ingredient to living a successful and fulfilled life.” -Jack Canfield

Gratitude is such a powerful concept, essential to our being and pivotal to our life, that I keep coming back to it. After exploring gratitude through appreciation, expressing it, finding gratitude when it’s hard, and giving, a deeper philosophical question emerged: How does gratitude influence our success, shape our perceptions, relationships, and worldview? Let’s explore. Read more!

9 Reading and Writing Principles You Can Apply to Your Life

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” -Dr. Seuss

Reading and writing are fascinating. I believe they are the most important skills you can learn in school. Writing is generally about communicating ideas and stories that transport the audience to a place from which they leave transformed. Less obvious, though, is that writing is also about the writer’s personal transformation. Writing is like a liaison between our inner world and the outer world. Read more!

Beyond Inspiration, Willpower, and Hard Work

How to Keep Learning, Growing, and Moving Forward

There are moments in life that just happen. When we’re young, we can learn a second language effortlessly. As adults, sometimes we feel inspired and suddenly tap into our creativity. We want to believe that all it takes to achieve important things is willpower. We think, if only we tried hard enough. We push ourselves to get things done through sheer hard work, but eventually we relapse into our old ways. Making progress is anything but linear, and to sustain it, we need a better approach. We must go beyond inspiration, willpower, and hard work. Read more!

Don’t Be Afraid to Make a Fool of Yourself

“A mistake that makes you humble is better than an achievement that makes you arrogant.” – Unknown

When I was in second grade, I was sort of a class clown. I remember feeling proud of myself because I could make the kids laugh, and I thought I was making an otherwise boring class more fun. Of course, that didn’t go well. I was shamed for being disruptive to the class. Many such things shape us in many areas of life—molding us to conform to societal norms and expectations. We grow up to seek external validation and recognition. We go on a quest to be smart. Unfortunately, we become afraid to make a fool of ourselves for the rest of our lives. Read more!

The Truth About the Rat Race

What is the rat race?

The rat race is a metaphor in finance that illustrates the pointless pursuit to achieve some degree of financial independence, like rats in a maze that never quite make it to the cheese. Popularized by Robert Kiyosaki with his board game Cashflow and his many books, the concept became a concrete way to showcase how we can be financially trapped as the obligations in life keep exceeding what we earn, despite our persistent hard work. Read more!

Understanding What Real Risk Is (And How to Manage It)

A lesson from the Sonoran Desert

The Sonoran Desert is home to powerful cacti—like the Saguaro and the Cardon Gigante which are the tallest and largest cacti in North America. Did you know that the Cardon Gigante can even grow without soil on bare rock? The Cardon Gigante can withstand temperatures of up to 50°C (122 F)! On the other hand, the Saguaro flourishes during the summer due to its “thick waxy coating that waterproofs” it. All cacti are impressive. Just as the Black Spruce thrives in the tundra, these cacti thrive in the desert. Read more!

Restrictions: Resources and Time

“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.” –Robert Kiyosaki

In life, there are all sorts of restrictions. There’s federal laws, state laws, cultural norms, and every organization has its own set of rules. We are restricted (positively mostly) by these laws and restrictions. In art, we’re restricted by the canvas, in photography by the frame, and in chess by its rules. Useful restrictions and rules help keep systems from falling apart. Furthermore, they become the source of creativity. But what about money? Do we really see money as a restriction? Do we get creative around it? Or are we passive (and mostly unconscious) about it? Also, who restricts it? Without a doubt, restrictions of resources and time dictate much of how we go about life. Read more!

Marriage and Life

What Marriage Has to Teach Us About Life.

Marriage has been under pressure. I hear many stories about why some people don’t need the government or church involved in their relationships. Comments range from: “I’m spiritual, but not religious” to “I don’t need anyone or anything to show how committed I am.” It’s also no surprise that the overall rate of divorce is quite high. A significant amount of people prefer open relationships, cohabitation, etc. I even hear some arguments that monogamy isn’t biological. Read more!

What Is Excellence?

What is excellence? What does it mean to you? Excellence is not about being perfect. It is a value: a state of ownership in your work and a mark of your craft. Unfortunately, in today’s busy world, excellence is sacrificed for speedy work and quick profits. Quantity over quality. I’d argue that excellence is no longer a priority. But why not? Do we perceive it as something too idealistic? Are we afraid to fail or to fall short? Perhaps it’s simply because we don’t really know what excellence is and how we can achieve it. Consider the following poem by Marge Piercy: Read more!

What is Leadership?

“May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership… Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

What is leadership? There’s so many takes on it. It is a vague concept. But I think most of us know what it looks like when we experience good leadership. Here’s a story:

9 Industrial Engineering Principles You Can Apply to Your Life

All fields of engineering are not only valuable but interesting. However, Industrial Engineering is perhaps the least understood. It’s never quite clear what one does. It’s an essential field that glues it all together, kind of like a liaison between engineering fields, business, and life. Most importantly, Industrial Engineering has many skills that you can directly apply to your life without getting too technical and can serve as guiding principles. Let’s explore these 9 Industrial Engineering principles: Read more!

Parenting and Life 2

Parenting has kept me in awe. To become a dad or a mom is profound. It’s difficult to explain. It’s a series of feelings you can hardly imagine before you become a parent. When you become one, it is such an honor, it’s so beautiful and permanent. Not only at birth, but ever after there’s a constant flood of feelings, learning, and challenges. And this leads me to ask the questions: What does it mean to be a parent? What is my role or duty as a dad? Read more!

How to Be More Confident

The 3 C’s to build more confidence

At a seminar, I once heard that knowledge can be divided in three ways: the things that you know that you know, what you know that you don’t know, and what you don’t know that you don’t know. We can definitely feel very confident in certain areas but not so much in others. Naturally, the more we know about a specific domain, the more confident we feel about it. Read more!

Character Over Skills

Why character matters most

Finding out how to develop skills, face setbacks, and continue learning is always both interesting and intriguing. However, I’ve noticed with time that character tends to have a more profound impact on anything we do. Character traits are fundamentally more important than skill-sets or degrees. Skills certainly help forge character, but it is character that persists despite setbacks and moves forward. Read more!

Finding Strength in Your Weaknesses

We’ve all experienced the most popular interview question ever: “What is your weakness?” About everyone prepares an answer to the question. And there’s certainly no shortage of advice as to how to answer that. I’ve heard answers like: “I’m a perfectionist, and it gets in the way.” Honestly though, I think that question might actually be more useful finding out how genuine someone is more than anything else. However, finding strength in your weaknesses is not only overlooked but often times simply dismissed as unimportant. So why do weaknesses/strengths matter? Let’s find out. Read more!

Chess and Life: The Real Value of Chess

Chess is an incredible game that teaches you many things. With every chess puzzle you struggle to solve, you can learn a little bit more about your own thinking processes, patterns, and biases. As we’ll see, chess can be very helpful in life too. Life unfolds as you make a series of decisions, just like chess. Read more!